Reaching out to your community's members is an important community-management task. This article describes how to:

• Email all Members of a community
• Email an individual Member of a community

Group Manager module

If your organization licenses the optional Group Manager module, you'll have access to additional features and enhanced functionality. These differences are called out in NOTES in this article.

See Group Manager Overview to learn more about these additional features and how to enable them.

Email all Members

Up first, let's look at how to enable the baseline Email Community Members functionality, then set up its default email template, and then use it to email a community's members.

NOTE: Super Admins control whether Community Admins are allowed to email their members via this method. If the Email Community Members option is not available to you, contact your Super Admin.

Step 1 - Enable the Email Community Members functionality

IMPORTANT: The information in this section is applicable to Super Admins only.

Super Admins can enable this feature per Community Type, and can then control which Community Admins can and cannot email their members.

NOTE: These instructions detail editing a Community Type; the same option is presented when creating a Community Type.

To enable Email Community Members:

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Community > Communities > Types.

3. Select a Community Type from the list and click Edit.
4. Scroll down in the dialog to the Emails section and check the box next to Enable Community Admins to send emails to members.

NOTE: If you license Group Manager, checking this box presents additional, related options as shown below. See Community Types for information on these options.

5. Scroll down and click Save.

Step 2 - Configure the email template

IMPORTANT: The information in this section is applicable to Super Admins only.

All emails that are sent using the Email Community Members feature are based on a single template, Community Bulk Email. You should review the template and make any necessary updates.

NOTE: If your organization licenses Group Manager, you can create and send unlimited templates; see Enhanced Community Email.

To access the template:

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Email > Email Management > Email Templates.

3. Select Community Messages from the Category dropdown.
4. Click the template name (or click Edit in the Actions column) to open the template's Edit page.

5. Review the options, settings, and fields; make any necessary updates — with the following exceptions.

Do NOT remove:

• any of the default mail-merge variables already in place.
• the [CommunityAdminMessage] variable in either the HTML or text-only versions of the message. This variable is critical because it gets replaced with your or another admin's message when emailing community members.
• the [CommunityAdminHyperlinks] variable (Group Manager users only) because this variable is populated with hyperlinks to uploaded files and/or meeting invitations.

Step 3 - Email a community's Members

Now that this feature is enabled and its template is set up, let's learn how to email all the members of a community.

1. On a community's Home page, click Settings.
2. Click Email Community Members.

3. Choose whether to send the message to:

• all members who've joined in the last 30 days or
• all of the community's members.

NOTE: If your organization licenses Group Manager and you have created data sources, they'll be available in this dropdown; see Enhanced Community Email.

The number of members who will receive your message displays as a link below the To field; click the link to view the list of recipients in an overlay popup.

NOTE: The message will not be sent to any members who have opted-out of community emails.

4. Specify a subject and message, and click Preview Email Before Sending to make sure your message is how you want it before sending it. This is an opportunity to verify that any variables you have included in the template are working properly.

NOTE: If your organization licenses Group Manager, you can also add a meeting invitation and attachments to your message using their respective buttons. See Enhanced Community Email.

5. When you're ready, click Send Email.

Email an individual Member

While reaching all of a community's members can save time and effort, you can also focus your outreach to a single individual. From the community's Members tab, you can locate a user by:

1. Searching for them using the available criteria. This makes it much easier to find a specific person in a large community.
2. Browsing the member list at the bottom of the page. ALL of the community's members are listed here, and you can use the menus to filter them by name, company, city, state, or country (it's sorted by Name A—Z, by default). Click the page buttons at the bottom of the page to view more results if there are a lot of members.

3. Once you've found the person you want to reach out to, click Send Message and write your message in the pop-up. They'll receive your message in their profile Inbox AND in a notification email sent to their account's primary email address.

NOTE: You can insert HTML tags in the message.

Integration write-backs

If your Higher Logic site is associated with a third-party integrated database, some messaging activities in your Community can be written to that database during the standard activity-sync process.

• Navigate to Settings > External Content > Activity Sync in the Admin interface in order to manage writeback activities on the Subscriptions tab.

To learn about the activity-sync process, see Member Activity Sync.